The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jan. 07, 2003
Filed:
Jan. 23, 1998
Brian M. Finn, Madison, WI (US);
Michael P. Nowak, Greendale, WI (US);
Digisonix LLC, Madison, WI (US);
Abstract
An integrated vehicle voice enhancement system and hands-free cellular telephone system implements microphone steering techniques and noise reduction filtering to improve the intelligibility and clarity of transmitted signals. A microphone steering switch is provided for the cellular telephone interface which allows only one of the microphones to be switched in to an “on” state at any given time. The microphone steering switch generates a raw telephone input switch that is a combination of 100% of the designated primary microphone signal and approximately 20% of the microphone signals from microphones in the “off” state. In this manner, the telephone line does not appear dead to a listener on the other end of the telephone line when speech is not present in the telephone input signal. A noise reduction filter filters the raw telephone signal in the time domain in real time to improve the clarity of the telephone input signal when speech is present in the telephone input signal. A microphone steering switch for the voice enhancement system is also provided to implement switching between acoustically coupled microphones located within the vehicle.